Sim City getting an educational release

Written by David Hing

January 21, 2013 | 10:08

Tags: #educational #sim-city

Companies: #ea #maxis

EA is releasing a version of Sim City especially designed for educational purposes.

SimCityEDU will be intended as a resource for teachers who want to use the tool to help encourage interest in science, maths, technology and engineering based subjects.

It will be built around helping teachers base lesson plans around the challenges facing modern cities and aims to help children develop leadership skills through urban planning, environmental management and socio-economic development.

To build the title, EA has worked in conjunction with GlassLab, a design studio that focuses on learning through video games.

The classic city building sim is gearing up for the release of the latest iteration in the series, confusingly titled SimCity, which is scheduled to drop on March 5.

'We want to up the ante of SimCity’s educational influence,' said EA Maxis general manager and senior vice-president Lucy Bradshaw. 'For decades, SimCity has been embraced by the educational community as an engaging videogame that also provides a powerful learning experience, teaching problem solving skills through imaginative civic gameplay,'

Minecraft has also proved to be a popular classroom tool. Much like the plans for SimCityEDU, a specially modded version of the game, MinecraftEdu, has been created by a small team across the US and Finland alongside Mojang itself. The project consists of features that make it easier to use in a classroom environment and Mojang has agreed to half the price of the game if it is being bought for educational purposes.
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